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Palestinian Affairs: The Fence Mender
Isabel Kershner
Baruch Spiegel has been hired by the Defense Minister to try to find the balance between Palestinian humanitarian needs and protecting Israel against Hamas
It's seven hours after the Israeli missile strike that killed Hamas founder and leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in a Gaza alleyway on March 22, and the Palestinian territories have been clamped under total closure for the next few days, or weeks. Israel is on a major security alert, braced for revenge attacks by Hamas bombers and their sympathetic rivals and colleagues among the Fatah-affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs� Brigades.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Baruch Spiegel is sitting in an office at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, trying to remain optimistic about his new job. Brought in eight weeks ago by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, Spiegel heads an inter-agency team dealing with Palestinian civilian and humanitarian issues arising from the security fence. He is also responsible for a project to make Israel�s checkpoint regime throughout the West Bank more efficient and "user-friendly" for Palestinians, and to have as many unnecessary roadblocks removed as possible.
Since the earliest days of the second intifada, dozens of checkpoints, roadblocks and other obstacles have gone up around the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as part of Israel�s security plan to "encircle" Palestinian population centers and stop the terrorists in their tracks. Naturally, the security measures also prevent the free movement of the rest of the Palestinian population of some 3.5 million souls. Slammed by the Palestinians and international human rights organizations as a means of "collective punishment," the roadblocks have become a public relations liability for Israel, with never-ending stories of abuse and humiliation of ordinary Palestinians by bored and frustrated soldiers.
And in the last year, Israel�s latest answer to the suicide bombers, the security fence now going up between Israel and the West Bank, has caused an international uproar. Mostly constructed on West Bank land, the fence, with its twisting route initially designed to take in as many Jewish settlements as possible, cuts between thousands of Palestinian farmers and their fields and separates entire Palestinian communities from each other.
Enter Spiegel. The idea, he says, is to provide "a balance between security and civilian needs, to allow as normal a life as possible" for the Palestinian population. In other words, Spiegel is trying to separate the war on terror from the uninvolved mass of ordinary Palestinians. Or as he sums up his mission: "To give hope."
A trim, affable man in civilian clothes with a neat beard, Spiegel has spent his recent years in private consulting for the Economic Cooperation Forum (a dovish Tel Aviv think-tank founded by Yossi Beilin and Yair Hirschfeld, two of the initiators of the Oslo accords), and as a regular participant on the Track II circuit of unofficial meetings and dialogue between Israeli, Palestinian and other Arab academics and experts. During his army career he served as the commander of the Golani Brigades, as deputy coordinator of government activities in the territories and as a special liaison to UNIFIL in South Lebanon at a time of tension and friction over incidents in which members of the U.N. peackeeping force were accidently killed by Israeli fire. Said to have come up then with some constructive and creative solutions, the challenge he now faces is no less complex.
The killing of Yassin and the subsequent security alert don�t make his mission any easier, Spiegel acknowledges. "But we are working on a systematic approach. Everything is closed for now, and security needs take precedence over all else. But I hope that within a few days things will calm down and we can continue our work."
In trying to put a kinder face on Israel�s anti-terror efforts and restore some of the humanitarian elements that used to enable Israel to boast that the occupation was "benign," Spiegel is up against a skeptical Palestinian public and adversaries who seem to have few humanitarian qualms of their own. In mid-March, Al-Aqsa operatives from the Balata refugee camp in Nablus got an unwitting 10-year-old to transfer a bomb across the Hawara checkpoint south of the city, and on the 24th, two days after the Yassin assassination, they strapped a suicide vest onto a dim-witted 16-year-old boy in the same spot. In both cases, alert soldiers at the checkpoint prevented disasters.
In some ways, Spiegel is dealing with a chicken-and-egg situation. The Palestinians have long cited the checkpoints themselves as one of the chief spurs to terror, saying that they cause mass humiliation, frustration, and in extreme cases of medical emergency, even death. If not an incentive to violence per se, Palestinian officials assert, the checkpoints certainly help create the supportive environment in which the terrorists operate.
Spiegel, well aware of the argument, is all for reducing the points of friction between the army and the Palestinian population. "We all know the problems at the roadblocks -- the soldiers� behavior, the harassment and so on," he says, suggesting that the fewer checkpoints, the better, and that service has to be improved at the ones that remain.
Asked what the criteria are for determining which checkpoints are non-essential, though, the soft-spoken general throws the ball back into the Palestinian court. "In Nablus, for example, there is an extensive terrorist infrastructure," he says. "The concept is that if Nablus adopts a lower terror profile, then we could consider taking down some of the checkpoints around it."
Today, according to Spiegel, there are 20 checkpoints on roads leading from the Palestinian territories into Israel, and another six "mobile" road blocks that are set up between Palestinian towns, and move around according to security needs. Those figures don�t include the dozens of earth mounds and other unmanned obstacles put up by the army to block vehicle traffic on roads in and out of many of the villages, for example, but Spiegel downplays their significance, saying the residents merely "find alternative routes" -- seemingly proving the Palestinians� point that such measures are more about harassment and collective punishment than security.
Spiegel was first approached by the army chief of staff to look into the roadblock regime in early 2002. "I took a team of officers and went out to inspect the situation at the checkpoints incognito for two weeks," he recalls. But then came the Park Hotel Passover bombing in Netanya, followed by Operation Defensive Shield, the army�s biggest military campaign in the West Bank since 1967.
The security establishment was then entirely focused on fighting terror. "It took a while to realize that we have to make a distinction between that and the civilian population," says Spiegel. Ironically, in the end, it was the bad press Israel got in Defensive Shield -- particularly during the Jenin "massacre" debacle, when Israel kept international organizations out of the area and was wrongly accused of killing hundreds of civilians -- that underlined the need for a change, and led the army to start looking at a range of humanitarian issues.
Spiegel had already written up recommendations on reducing army/population points of friction, some of which are now at implementation stage. Twenty-two military checkpoints or roadblocks have been removed over the past five months. One example is the notorious Surda roadblock, on the main road between Ramallah and Bir Zeit University, where two rows of rocks about 500 meters apart permanently blocked the road whether any soldiers were around or not, preventing cars from driving through for the good part of three years.
(By the summer, a lively business had grown up at Surda, ferrying Palestinians and their baggage between the rock barriers in horse-drawn buggies to taxis waiting in chaotic jams at either side. On one occasion, this reporter saw a covered horse-drawn wagon transporting a long, green-painted gas cylinder across the roadblock in the direction of Ramallah that could just as easily have been a Qassam rocket.)
Spiegel�s team has devised an integrated strategy to start upgrading the infrastructure at eight of the most problematic checkpoints first. Recommendations include determining clear rules and orders guiding who is allowed to cross the checkpoints and who not; lengthening the opening hours; an ethical code of conduct guiding soldiers� behavior; training and supervision; dealing with "burn out," a common problem of soldiers manning checkpoints over long periods of time; upgrading manpower capabilities and capacities; providing technological answers to security issues to complement the soldiers� work; and improving the infrastructure and standard of service, providing water, organized parking facilities and the like.
Two months ago, in addition to heading the project on checkpoints, Mofaz called Spiegel in to focus on the security fence. Working together with colleagues in the National Security Council, the Shin Bet security service, the police, the army and other agencies, Spiegel is mandated to examine and find solutions for "present and future civilian and humanitarian problems" arising from the construction of the barrier, reporting to Mofaz himself.
"The concept before was build first, and worry about the problems later," Spiegel states. "We say that�s not the way."
Although the defense establishment repeatedly denies the effects on its decision-making of international or domestic pressure, Spiegel�s January 27 appointment came shortly before the February 9 petition to Israel�s Supreme Court by two Israeli human rights organizations concerning the violation of Palestinian rights by the fence, and three weeks before the start of hearings at the International Court in The Hague. Cynics who doubt Spiegel�s ability to make a significant difference say he�s been brought in as a figleaf.
The West Bamk village of Qaffin, nestling in the rolling countryside north of Tul Karm, looks the picture of an ideal, simple rural existence. Houses dot hillsides ablaze with a riot of spring flowers. Sheep and goats graze lazily, while the aroma of freshly baked bread wafts through the alleyways from household tabouns. The reality, though, is as harsh as the stony ground. "What is happening here is a catastrophe, a real tragedy," says the mayor, Taysir Harashe.
Qaffin sits only about a kilometer east of the Green Line, the 1967 border between Israel and the West Bank. Since the security fence went up last spring, cutting through the land between the village and the invisible Green Line, Qaffin�s population of 8,000 has lost two prime sources of income: laborers and traders can no longer make their way into Israel, and farmers have lost free access to some 4,800 dunams (1,200 acres), or around 60 percent, of the village lands planted with some 100,000 olive trees. According to Mayor Harashe, there is 90 percent unemployment. "There are families here literally without a penny," he says.
A gate was placed in the fence at Qaffin a few weeks ago, but as far as Harashe can tell, it has only been used up till now by the army. The Qaffin municipality has applied to the Palestinian Authority District Coordinator�s Office in Tul Karm for 500 permits for its farmers to be able to cross to their lands. The DCO will liaise with the Israeli authorities, but it is likely to be a lengthy process. Harashe acknowledges that the PA only recently allowed applications to be made, having held off earlier for political reasons of not wanting to legitimize the fence. Most farmers first have to apply for land ownership documents they�ve been told they need from another office in Tul Karm.
During the olive picking season last fall, Israel issued Qaffin�s villagers with several hundred temporary permits for an existing gate 12 kilometers away, near Baqa al-Sharqiya, accessible only by foot or donkey.
Those who made it were exhausted by the time they got there, Harashe recalls. And whereas the olive season started on October 1, the first permits for Qaffin�s pickers only came through by October 24. Many found that their olives had already been stolen off the trees "by goats," Harashe says (though it is entirely possible that locals from Baqa al-Sharqiya and nearby Baqa al-Gharbiya had helped themselves too).
Qaffin is not one of the most dramatic examples of communities hurt by the new security barrier, and has not received the attention of, say, Khirbet Jubara, a hamlet of 300 stuck in an isolated enclave between the fence and the Green Line south of Tul Karm, whose children have to be let across the barrier by soldiers just to get to school. It is, though, one of the many cases that add up to tens, or hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians whose lives are now adversely affected, and for whom Spiegel is tasked with finding solutions.
Though he isn�t familiar with the specifics of Qaffin, Spiegel insists that every problem will have an answer. Every community with fields or orchards across the barrier will be provided with a gate, and special permits will be given to all residents who have land on the other side, so long as they do not present a particular security threat. The 150 kilometers of completed fence already has 31 agricultural gates -- though Spiegel acknowledges that their opening hours are often erratic -- and by the end of the route, the total is likely to be over 60. The more gates, though, the more potential security holes. The suicide bomber who carried out the Maxim restaurant attack last October came through the gate at Barta�a, a few kilometers north of Qaffin.
Many of the fence�s original architects, like former National Security Council head Uzi Dayan, note that Prime Minister Sharon was originally reluctant to build the fence at all, for fear of laying down a political border. Forced by popular opinion to go ahead with the project anyway, experts say, Sharon then tried to "hijack" the barrier and route it to fit his own vision for the West Bank, effectively annexing swathes of land and enclosing Palestinian towns in enclaves surrounded by secondary "depth" barriers far into the West Bank. But U.S. pressure, among other factors, has had its way, leading to compromises on the route. And the appointment of Spiegel comes as another ironic twist.
"We�re here for adaptation," says Speigel, whose team is making recommendations to try to influence the route of the fence as well.
Logically, the closer the fence runs to the Green Line, the less Palestinian civilian life will be harmed. And though any recognition of the 1967 border is anathema to many in the Sharon government, one significant change in the route has already been made at Baqa al-Sharqiya. Some 8 kilometers of the original fence that had enclosed thousands of the town�s West Bank residents in an enclave has been taken down. Instead, a new stretch of concrete wall and fence now runs along the 1967 boundary between Baqa al-Sharqiya and Baqa al-Gharbiya, an adjacent town just inside Israel.
A decision has also been taken to move the fence at Khirbet Jubara west to the Green Line, rejoining the village with the rest of the West Bank. The fence was originally placed east of Khirbet Jubara, the IDF�s fence project head Danny Tirza explained, in order to give the army enough of an "operational margin" between the barrier and the Israeli Arab town of Taibe, just across the Green Line. The space is meant to give the army a chance to catch up with any intruders before they melt into the urban sprawl. Spiegel says that in the case of Khirbet Jubara, though, "the humanitarian problems override the need for the operational margin." Further changes are in the offing, he adds, in other problematic areas like Azun Atma -- a village sandwiched between two settlements that is surrounded by the fence -- and Beit Surik.
Back in Qaffin, Taysir Harashe doesn�t hold out much hope. He says the farmers whose land is on the other side of the barrier consider it "lost." "They are praying to God to solve this problem," he says, adding that the village has also hired an Arab Israeli lawyer to take Qaffin�s case to the Supreme Court. "We�re asking for either access or compensation. Anything that will give us our rights," says the mayor.
Spiegel insists that the land, other than that taken up by the 60-meter-wide fence itself, is not "lost." It is his job to try to answer at least some of Qaffin�s prayers -- while always, of course, keeping the potential for terror in mind.
April 19, 2004
Palestinian Affairs
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